Live data from Hacker News

The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

thedrive.com

251–260 of 265 posts

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which country built the pocket computer/communicator? Which country built the electronics, circuit boards, cables, batteries, housing and fastening screws? Which country built the components and systems and subsystems that go into manufacturing an electric car? Which country has lithium, rare earth metal processing capabilities critical in manufacturing all modern electronic systems? Which country built the component…

The UK has clean drinking water despite losing its manufacturing primacy to the US 100 years ago.

Tell that to people in Flint Michigan.

https://www.propublica.org/events/the-flint-water-crisis-an-...

No amount of rosy thinking is going change the course of decline in this country.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#252
post #122

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

This reminds me of the following: “In my view, shared by many blue-suiters, this marvelous airplane should still be operational but, alas, that was not to be. One of the most depressing moments in the history of the Skunk Works occurred on February 5, 1970, when we received a telegram from the Pentagon ordering us to destroy all the tooling for the Blackbird. All the molds, jigs, and forty thousand detail tools were…

I don't understand this. I worked on the B-2 back in 1987-88, and two things about that program don't add up to having to reverse engineer anything.

First, the B-2 was the first large, complex product in history to be entirely developed digitally. Everything. was in CAD, and only the CAD geometry was authoritative. All drawings printed out were VERY clearly marked warning of this. IIRC, most of this was in Catia, so it should still be possible to read and use that data.

Second, if there's one thing Defense procurement Is good at, it's configuration management. This is doubly true of black programs like the B2, where not only do you want to make sure you never lose data or docs, but also that no bad guys ever have a way to get that data.

Either something went badly off the rails somewhere, or someone needs to rebuild something without the proper clearance. Otherwise, this makes no sense. BTW, the combo of the first complex CAD-only product multiplied by the hideous costs of any black program were largely responsible for the B-2's exorbitant costs.

Congress was stupid to cut B-2 production numbers, though, because the lion's share was fixed, sunk cost that remained the same regardless of whether one or a hundred airplanes were actually built.

(I think I've posted here before about how we spent many millions of dollars to develop a method to repair a major composite part in place. That part was pretty much what you started with when you put the airplane together, so even that was way cheaper than disassembling and reassembling the entire airplane!)

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#253

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

It's also possible the government did get all the technical data and then lost it. It has to be somebody's job to archive and catalog that stuff, and the cost of archiving comes out of somebody's budget. The pressure to just toss old dusty paper files to cut costs can be enormous. It might have happened because "Joe Smith was the archivist and he retired 10 years ago and we needed the space." If the data was classifi…

Configuration management, especially for black projects, is the one thing you can count on from the DoD and its contractors just as surely as taxes and waste.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#254

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

Yeah, very well might be. Usually so, these contracts include decades worth of spares. Things usually turn ugly when this period runs out, yet 25 years after delivery seems a bit short. Nice tid bit for the B-52. These old birds, old in the sense of designed pre CAD, are quite hard to understand for modern manufacturing. Even manufacturers rely on retires sometimes to understand these old drawings for their own plane…

You entire comment is monstrous bigotry of the modern. The B-2 was in fact the first large, complex product ever built entirely from a CAD database - a factor in its huge cost.

As a CIM Manager for a major B-2 subcontractor, I can assure you they knew what they were doing. Yes, even 30-35 years ago. Yes, they knew as much or more then than we know today about BOMs, manufacturing, CAD, digital records and archiving, documentation and configuration management, and everything else. (BOMs weren't in SAP, but they were in mainframe DBs, ERP systems, and CAD systems, some of which are still sold and used today.) I have literally never worked on any other program in my entire career that was as well-run and orchestrated overall as the B-2 program. (We called it ADP-101 at the time, and for the first few years, we didn't even know what we were working on!)

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#255

I can't be certain, but I suspect the real problem was that the original contract was signed without requiring the technical data rights and/or delivery of the technical data. This is a common mistake made by the DoD, and can lead to extraordinarily high costs later. Just look at the notice: "The deliverables will include all technical data related to the heat exchanger disassembly, all technical data related to the…

Why is it legal to do this? I don’t pay taxes so a bunch of morons can waste it on a consulting company trick

Keeping things is NOT free, especially for physical things like tooling/fixtures/equipment. It actually costs a surprising amount of money.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#256
post #3

Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…

We generally only reverse-engineer technologies from elsewhere (no, not other countries...)

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#257
post #204

Tangentially reminds me of this video by Jonathan Blow [0], "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization". The eye-opening moment, for me, was the importance (and neglect) of the inter-generational transfer of knowledge in maintaining technological complexity. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

That was the first thing I thought. Jon Blow was spot-on.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#258
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My heart hurts reading that. I felt something similar walking through Weird Stuff Warehouse and seeing old SGI workstations that I used to covet sitting on shelves for a pittance. Even if you bought them, you probably didn't have a 13w3 monitor or software to get them up. and now weird stuff is gone itself. It's that "it's gone and can't come back" feeling.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/tech-history/... When we look backwards in time, we see lots of tributaries that dried up for various reasons. That SGI workstation is still in your head, it is really up to us to copy and extend those concepts forwards in time. That software is still sitting on a box of junk in someones basement somewhere, it just has to be found.

That software is sitting in an SGI in my basement :-)

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#259
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And likely to be in service for another 30 years. A 100 year airframe

I worked at Boeing Wichita (which is no more), and an engineer told me that the B-52 was getting heavier over time because the old wires weren't removed for avionics upgrades. Of course, they were always trying to put one over on me as a newbie (I worked on avionics S/W in Ada for the tankers). He also said a big problem was the expense of doing a modern engine upgrade. Anyone know if they ever re-engined it? Was he…

20 years later, looks like they are taking RFPs for re-engining:

[PDF] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11413

I guess he was right about the engines.

Re: The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber

#260
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem is that while you are writing documentation you are not making money for the company. I remember when I and Dave as the senior tech told our boss that we should put the most common repairs into a database so new hires would not have to ask us questions all the time. He asked how long the job would take, and we answered about a week for all the common stuff. And his answer was, "That is a week you will…

I think the best way to think of this part of a wiki is as a cache for everybody's help. No need to pre-populate the cache, just start using it, and the most frequently used information will tend to be there.

Definitely, not perfect readme or documentation but at least that covers 70% of cases.
Post reply on HN